The BBC is to remake 'Civilisation’, but is there a presenter today as good as
the original, Kenneth Clark

On the face of it, the idea of remaking Civilisation, Kenneth Clark’s television series of 1969, needs some justifying. The original hasn’t gone away, or been wiped from the tapes. In fact, the BBC repeated the whole thing on HD TV in 2011.

The subject of the series – the visual arts, architecture and philosophy of the past 1,000 years or so – might be thought not to have changed very much. Kenneth Clark was a highly intelligent and incisive man, and the book of the series, consisting of the scripts with illustrations, is still in print in 2014.

We don’t feel the need to remake a great novel after a few decades. So what has changed so radically, since 1969, to justify a remake? And what chance is there that a remake will come anywhere near the quality of the original?

It’s reasonable to ask whether a search is likely to produce any writer/presenter who could be the equal of Clark. He was made director of the National Gallery at the age of 30, as well as Surveyor of the King’s Pictures. He was an imaginative cultural tsar, creating such important events as the National Gallery concerts during the war, when the entire collection was despatched for safety to a Welsh mine. His endeavour to bring high culture to the general public took a further step with his role in the creation of the Arts Council and the art programme of the Festival of Britain, in 1951.

It is possible to see him as a Ruskinian figure, convinced that the greatest works of art can be introduced to any citizen, whether rich or poor, educated or uneducated. Perhaps the high point of this confident belief came in 1969, with Clark introducing the great sweep of Western culture to a huge television audience in Civilisation.

Civilisation is a magnificent statement, but it may be very much of its age. In the first instance, its ability to travel round Europe and North America was probably more impressive to its first audience than it is now. Most people with a moderate interest in the visual arts will be able to travel on a cheap flight to the treasures of the Prado, the Louvre, the Hermitage and the Uffizi. Clark was introducing audiences to what they would never have seen: his successor will be reminding much of the audience of what they are familiar with.

But other shifts are more conceptual in nature. The moment when a series about Western art could be described as covering “civilisation” is long gone. Quite rightly, the successor, even if limited to the highest achievements of civilisation, is going to want to talk about Benin bronzes, Mughal culture, the pinnacles of Chinese arts. There will be talk of the art of minorities, perhaps “outsider” art, and women artists will occupy a much more central place than they did for Clark.

Scholars of oriental art existed in 1969, of course; one of the perverse developments since then has been that, with the denouncing of “Orientalism” by Edward Said’s 1979 book of the same name, we are both much more aware of the importance of non-European art, but rather pathetically nervous about discussing it at all. This will have to be addressed by the makers of the series.

There is, too, the undeniable fact that modern art, apparently regarded by Clark as an optional specialist interest, has shifted to the very forefront of our sense of civilisation. The series will want to talk at length not just about modern, but about contemporary art.

And there are other issues, to do with our readiness to sit and listen to someone explaining matters to us. Around the time of Civilisation’s first broadcast, a general erosion of respect for authority was taking place. In political terms, the shift from a pre-war world where Douglas Jay could write of the “gentleman in Whitehall” knowing best, to a world where individuals were free to make their own decisions and mistakes was in process. This process was going to spread in the mind to a general suspicion of authority, and a rejection of the confident opinions of experts. One quite likely response to the brisk and decisive judgments of Lord Clark nowadays might well be: “Who do you think you are?” Who is Lord Clark to tell us what whole cultures are worth, and whether you should like one painter more than another? The answer – that Clark had spent a lifetime looking at, and thinking about visual culture, that he knew a great deal about Renaissance art – was impressive in 1969. In 2014, the response to an expert is just as likely to be, “Well, Sue and I went to see those Piero della Francescas in – what’s that town called? – Sansepolcro, and we had a lovely lunch but I couldn’t stand them, I think they’re really dreary.” Anyone’s opinion is, it sometimes seems, as good as anyone else’s.

The BBC has undeniably responded to this culturally confident suspicion of the expert by handing over a good deal of its arts coverage to enthusiastic amateurs who, it is clear, are very similar to Philip Larkin’s “ruin-bibbers, randy for antique”. In recent years, the way to explore the work of a major painter seems to have been to hand it over to a television personality, eager to assure us about the facts of their own lives. Objective discussion of the ostensible subject comes a long way after coy subjective glimpses of the presenter’s personal life.

A low point came with a wildly popular series called Rolf on Art, in which Rolf Harris, the execrable painter, took on a series of well-known artists while actually talking about himself; subsequently, he painted something declared to be “in the style” of each artist. Two minutes of an articulate picture restorer or educated curator would have informed the audience much more about each artist than Harris’s chuckling monologue.

Experts have not, quite, disappeared, but expertise in presenting is rated far above expertise in the subject matter. The list of possible presenters being touted at the weekend for the remake of Civilisation was instructive. There were some highly intelligent people being suggested, such as Mary Beard; but her area of expertise is the classical world, not Clark’s field. Dan Snow and Andrew Marr are intelligent men, at the front of the suggested field, but can anyone think that their expertise is remotely comparable to Kenneth Clark’s?

The tragedy is that there are apparently unconsidered people with offices within a mile of Broadcasting House who could bring the knowledge of a lifetime to such a series of education and gravity. Neil MacGregor has been the director of the National Gallery and, currently, of the British Museum. His radio series, A History of the World in 100 Objects, showed him to be a natural broadcaster, wise, insightful and lucidly approachable. He would be perfect, and a new Civilisation would suit his interest in cultures across the world exactly.

Another figure who truly knows the subject, and would be able to explain in precise, approachable terms what art is might be the current director of the National Gallery, Nicholas Penny. Anyone who reads his books on Raphael or antique sculpture would be in no doubt of the powers of lucid exposition this towering polymath possesses.

Art, of course, has never been more popular, and nowhere in Europe is it more popular than in the UK – just compare the number of first-rate exhibitions mounted in London each year to any other city in the world. But with the spread of enthusiasm and excitement around visual culture, we increasingly want to know what it is; what it means as well as what it meant.

What we need is a Kenneth Clark, with boundless confidence in the universal significance of his subject, an apparently limitless knowledge of it, and the ability to talk coherently and convincingly at length. Fiona Bruce – currently 16 to 1 at the bookmakers as a possible presenter – is probably not quite right for this particular job.